




.c°.-^Lt.°- J**s£fcr\. >°.-^t.°- .A' 












; a>v 








^oV T 




,•- ^o* ! 






^F> * » ■» .V 















$&: *^ -SSS- V** #fc \/ .-ate <* 












"^o* 











«&* \/ .-ate %*♦♦ .^« 














•4^^ 






c»o\ y~l a "* 

ADDRESS 



OF 



/ If 



PRESIDENT WILSON 



AT 



FLAG DAY EXERCISES 

OF THE 

TREASURY DEPARTMENT 



JUNE 14, 1915 




WASHINGTON 
1915 







\3 



JUL 9 !9t5 






ADDRESS 



The President at Flag Day exercises of the Treasury Department, 
June 14, 1915: 
Mr. Secretary, Friends and Fellow- Citizens : 

I know of nothing more difficult than to render an adequate tribute 
to the emblem of our nation. For those of us who have shared that 
nation's life and felt the beat of its pulse it must be considered a mat- 
ter of impossibility to express the great things which that emblem 
embodies. I venture to say that a great many things are said about 
the flag which very few people stop to analyze. For me the flag does 
not express a mere body of vague sentiment. /The flag of the United 
States has not been created by rhetorical sentences in declarations 
of independence and in bills of rights. It has been created by the ex- 
perience of a great people, and nothing is written upon it that has 
not been written by their life. It is the embodiment, not of a senti- 
ment, but of a history, and no man can rightly serve under that 
flag who has not caught some of the meaning of that history. ] 

Experience, ladies and gentlemen, is made by men and women. 
National experience is the product of those who do the living under 
that flag. It is their living that has created its significance. You do 
not create the meaning of a national life by any literary exposition 
of it, but by the actual daily endeavors of a great people to do the 
tasks of the day and live up to the ideals of honesty and righteous- 
ness and just conduct. And as we think of these things, our tribute 
is to those men who have created this experience. Many of them 
are known by name to all the world, — statesmen, soldiers, merchants, 
masters of industry, men of letters and of thought who have coined 
our hearts into action or into words. Of these men we feel that 
they have shown us the way. They have not been afraid to go 
before. They have known that they were speaking the thoughts of 
a great people when they led that great people along the paths of 
achievement. There was not a single swashbuckler among them. 
They were men of sober, quiet thought, the more effective because 
there was no bluster in it. They were men who thought along the 
lines of duty, not along the lines of self-aggrandizement. They 
were men, in short, who thought of the people whom they served 
and not of themselves. / 

97868J 15 3 



But while we think of these men and do honor to them as to those 
who have shown us the way, let us not forget that the real experience 
and life of a nation lies with the great multitude of unknown men. It 
lies with those men whose names are never in the headlines of news- 
papers, those men who know the heat and pain and desperate loss of 
hope that sometimes comes in the great struggle of daily life; not the 
men who stand on the side and comment, not the men who merely try 
to interpret the great struggle, but the men who are engaged in the 
struggle. They constitute the body of the nation. This flag is the 
essence of their daily endeavors. This flag does not express any more 
than what they are and what they desire to be. 

As I think of the life of this great nation it seems to me that we 
sometimes look to the wrong places for its sources. We look to the 
noisy places, where men are talking in the market place ; we look to 
where men are expressing their individual opinions ; we look to where 
partisans are expressing passion : instead of trying to attune our ears 
to that voiceless mass of men who merely go about their daily tasks, 
try to be honorable, try to serve the people they love, try to live 
worthy of the great communities to which they belong. These are 
the breath of the nation's nostrils ; these are the sinew of its might. 

How can any man presume to interpret the emblem of the United 
States, the emblem of what we would fain be among the family of 
nations, and find it incumbent upon us to be in the daily round of 
routine duty ? This is Flag Day, but that only means that it is a. day 
when we are to recall the things which we should do every day of our 
lives. There are no days of special patriotism. There are no days 
when we should be more patriotic than on other days. We celebrate 
the Fourth of July merely because the great enterprise of liberty 
was started on the fourth of July in America, but the great enterprise 
of liberty was not begun in America. It is illustrated by the blood 
of thousands of martyrs who lived and died before the great experi- 
ment on this side of the water. The Fourth of July merely marks 
the day when we consecrated ourselves as a nation to this high thing 
which we pretend to serve. The benefit of a day like this is merely 
in turning away from the things that distract us, turning away from 
the things that touch us personally and absorb our interest in the 
hours of daily work. We remind ourselves of those things that are 
greater than we are, of those principles by which we believe our 
hearts to be elevated, of the more difficult things that we must under- 
take in these days of perplexity when a man's judgment is safest 
only when it follows the line of principle. 

I am solemnized in the presence of such a day. I would not 
undertake to speak youv thoughts. You must interpret them for 
me. But I do feel that back, not only of every public official, but 

[97868a] 



of every man and woman of the United States, there marches that 
great host which has brought us to the present day; the host that 
has never forgotten the vision which it saw at the birth of the 
nation; the host which always responds to the dictates of humanity 
and of liberty; the host that will always constitute the strength 
and the great body of friends of every man who does his duty to the 
United States. 

I am sorry that you do not wear a little flag of the Union every 
day 'instead of some days. I can only ask you, if you lose the 
physical emblem, to be sure that you wear it in your heart, and the 
heart of America shall interpret the heart of the world. 

[97S68A] 

O 



U p f A D 1 



y* ****** 


















*..•• <0 



,4^ 



9 VP 












*u* 



^0< 




w 

















^ 












oK 



iP^K 



v . * • 



v^^A.*< 















rf 



.^, : 






















*«<?> 




.^%>v/%. .* v% .»^ifefe*. 






.0 . ' • •- 



